Banana Oat Pancakes
Blended oats instead of flour, banana instead of sugar. Three main ingredients and no refined anything.
Nutrition Info (per serving)
- 380
- Calories
- 17g
- Protein
- 12g
- Fat
- 52g
- Carbs
Ingredients
- 150 g rolled oats
- 2 very ripe bananas
- 3 eggs
- 150 ml milk
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- A pinch of salt
- Butter or oil, for the pan
- Greek yoghurt and berries, to serve
Instructions
- 1Blitz the oats in a blender or food processor for about 60 seconds, until they are a fine flour with no whole flakes left.
- 2Add the bananas, eggs, milk, baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla and salt, and blend until smooth.
- 3Leave the batter to stand for 10 minutes. Oat flour absorbs liquid slowly, and this rest is what turns a thin, runny batter into one that holds its shape in the pan.
- 4Heat a non-stick frying pan over medium-low heat with a little butter. Medium-low, not medium-high — these pancakes are dense and sweet from the banana, and a hot pan burns the outside before the middle is cooked.
- 5Pour in rounds of about 3 tbsp each. Cook for 3 minutes, until bubbles appear across the surface and the edges look dry and set.
- 6Flip once and cook for 2 minutes more. Flipping repeatedly deflates them.
- 7Keep the cooked pancakes on a plate in a low oven while you do the rest, and serve with yoghurt and berries.
These are not diet pancakes pretending to be the real thing. They are a different pancake — denser, nuttier, sweeter from the fruit — and worth making on their own terms.
Blend the oats properly
Sixty seconds, not twenty. Any whole flakes left in the batter stay whole in the pancake and give it a gritty, porridge-like texture.
You are aiming for something that looks like coarse flour. A high-speed blender does this easily; a food processor takes longer and may need scraping down.
Ready-made oat flour works and saves a step.
Rest the batter
Oat flour has no gluten and it hydrates slowly. Straight after blending, the batter is thin and spreads into lace in the pan.
Ten minutes changes it noticeably — the starch swells, the batter thickens, and the pancakes hold a round shape. Twenty minutes is better still if you have it.
If it thickens too much, thin with a splash of milk.
Low heat
Bananas bring a lot of natural sugar, and sugar browns fast. On a medium-high pan these scorch on the outside in ninety seconds while the middle is still batter.
Medium-low, three minutes a side, is the setting. They will still brown properly — just more slowly and more evenly.
Very ripe bananas
Heavily speckled or nearly black. As bananas ripen, starch converts to sugar, so a ripe banana is both sweeter and softer, and it blends smooth instead of leaving lumps.
An underripe banana gives a starchy, faintly astringent pancake that needs added sugar to work.
Flip once
The bubbles that appear on the surface are carbon dioxide from the baking powder, and they are the structure. Every flip presses some of them out.
Wait for bubbles across the whole surface and dry-looking edges, then turn once.
Nutrition
Around 380 calories a serving with 17 grams of protein from the eggs and milk, and no added sugar at all — the sweetness is entirely from the fruit.
Oats bring soluble fibre and a slower release of energy than white flour, which is the practical difference you notice: these keep you going noticeably longer than a standard pancake breakfast.
The batter keeps overnight in the fridge and thickens further; cooked pancakes freeze well between sheets of baking paper and toast straight from frozen.
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